The Crisis of Abundance: Industrial Chemicals and the Problem of Too Much Food

In the early summer of 1954, a Life Magazine reporter came to Bob Whitmore’s Illinois corn farm to interview him about the “miracles” of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and the “bonanza” of industrial chemicals then aiding American farmers. The massive post-WWII influx of fertilizers and pesticides to America’s farms, the reporter noted, was not just creating a new age of agricultural abundance it was simultaneously creating a monetary windfall for American chemical companies. But Bob had a problem, one that neither his record yield nor the chemical industry’s record profits could fix. In fact, his record output made it worse. That was because as Bob Whitmore’s lush 1954 crop became the paragon of American technological prowess, his 1953 crop sat unsold in his storage barn, slowly degrading in quality. Bob’s problem was not his alone; it was symptomatic of an American agricultural system that produced vastly more food and fiber than could be eaten or sold. Bob’s abundance, the reporter concluded in a paragraph buried in the back of the magazine, while ostensibly necessary to keep pace with a growing world population, will likely become more surplus, further depressing prices, and potentially causing Bob himself to lose his farm.

Newspapers called it the “crisis of abundance.” Economists and government officials referred to it as the “farm problem.” For America’s farmers, however, it didn’t matter what it was called. In the post-WWII period American farmers used industrial chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides to grow more crops per acre than any farmers had before, but therein lied the problem. There were simply more farm products coming from America’s fields than there were mouths and markets. Crop prices fell, so did incomes; debts grew. The Crisis of Abundance: Industrial Chemicals and the Problem of Too Much Food (1945-1985) investigates the creation and upkeep of a post-WWII US agricultural system of high chemical input use and chronic surplus production. The book’s impetus begins with a simple question: if industrial chemicals are driving surplus production, how do you maintain and grow an agricultural system that uses more and more chemicals each year while not economically devastating the American farmer? The Crisis of Abundance investigates the techniques, technologies, policies, narratives, and institutions that created and upkept an agricultural system that on the one hand used industrial chemicals to produce vast surpluses while on the other hand constantly strove to alleviate the crushing effects of that chemically driven abundance on American farmers. In doing so, it challenges readers to rethink foundational notions of scarcity in the economic history of capitalism.

Industrial chemicals lie at the heart of global environmental change and agriculture has played a significant role in the creation of our modern chemical landscapes. Yet explanations of why American farmers use so many industrial chemicals remain proximate and elusive; they are used because without them we could not grow enough cheap food. The post WWII crisis of abundance shaped U.S. agriculture at a pivotal moment of its industrialization and it continues to do so today. It was this abundance, I argue, that in turn served as the major driver of industrial chemical use. In other words, while industrial chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers helped create vast crop surpluses in the first place, it perversely became that very surplus that drove farmers to use more and more industrial chemicals.